


Keris

by AlterEgon



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Colonialism, Gen, Magnus' past, Revenge, implied rape, time-typical racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:20:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 21,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26312527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlterEgon/pseuds/AlterEgon
Summary: A recent death shakes Magnus Bane with some eerie parallels to his own past. As the supposed suicide turns to probable murder, he begins questioning the circumstances surrounding his own mother's death. When proximity to the dagger that took his mother's life brings him visions of details long forgotten that do not fit into the narrative he had taken as truth regarding her last days or weeks, he, Alec, and their friends and family begin to investigate, uncovering unexepcted connections and a killer who has been on the loose for far too long.
Relationships: Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood
Comments: 18
Kudos: 54
Collections: Malec Discord Mini Bang 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was created for the Malec Discord Mini Bang 2020 hosted by the [Malec Discord Server](https://discord.gg/5nBgEp8)
> 
> My thanks go to my great betas, JimmyC and [hmweasley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hmweasley)), and my wonderful artist [Simon ](https://pigeon130.tumblr.com/post/628371327856820224/i-was-lucky-enough-to-participate-in-the))

“Magnus?”

Alec’s voice penetrated the screaming in Magnus’ head, though just barely. He blinked, acutely aware through it all that his glamor had slipped, and his shining golden eyes were visible to everyone. Except that everyone was only his husband, and Alec never minded. He called them beautiful even.

But Alec had been in his life for less than a year, and the voice of his father had been screaming in his head for centuries when anything happened to break through his mental seals. He’d gotten good at that.

It had been a long time since it had happened twice in the course of less than twelve months.

Then again, he hadn’t had a forced recall of that day in his childhood for an eternity, and neither had he been sent grisly photographs of a bloody death on his phone that were all too reminiscent of the images his own brain projected on the insides of his eyelids when he closed them against the sight.

But of course these hadn’t been unsolicited. He’d asked for them. He’d called in favors to get them even, as soon as he had parsed the message Catarina had sent him.

Not quite trusting his voice, he didn’t say anything. Instead, he simply tilted his phone to let Alec see.

He felt his husband frown at the sight.

“Did you know her?” he asked eventually.

Magnus shook his head, swallowing hard before he replied. “Never heard of her until this morning. Catarina told me because…” he gestured vaguely at the image. “Her daughter found her. She’s a warlock. The—the daughter I mean, not the dead woman.”

Alec nodded, his gaze fixed on the image of a woman, reclining on a bed, her eyes open and staring. Red was the dominant color, soaking the front of the t-shirt she wore in lieu of nightwear and the sheets around her. There was no question as to its source: a slim blade was deeply embedded in the woman’s chest.

“Did she—?” Alec gestured, and Magnus gave a half-shrug. “So it seems. Police have found no evidence of foul play. _Mundane_ police.” Magnus tapped the screen on his phone, pulling up the message Catarina had sent him earlier to let Alec read it. The woman had left instructions to contact Catarina, should anything happen to her, and so they had. She’d taken the girl in hand, and then informed the local Institute.

It wasn’t unknown for the mothers of warlocks to die untimely deaths, even by their own hands.

In particular by their own hands, Magnus amended. Many demons didn’t care if they left the woman they chose as the mother of their child traumatized. Even with those who didn’t, using glamors and pretense, it became clear sooner or later that the thing that had shared the woman’s bed had not been what he’d claimed to be – or any man at all. Only few took that as well as Catarina’s mother had, back in her time.

The Institute had sent a team. A dead mundane who had been in contact with the Shadow World certainly was within their jurisdiction. They came to the same conclusion, ruling it death by suicide and withdrawing as soon as they had ascertained that the young warlock was not going to end up in the hands of mundane authorities.

“I’m sorry, Magnus,” Alec said. His hands had gone to Magnus’ shoulders, squeezing gently. “This is—”

“Wrong,” Magnus said, looking up at him. “Something about this is wrong. It’s – call it a hunch, call it a premonition, or call it just a reaction to seeing a death so similar to my mother’s. Something about this isn’t right.”

Alec refrained from pointing out that the entire principle of a woman committing suicide after being raped by a demon wasn’t exactly something that could be called right in the best of circumstances. He merely met Magnus’ gaze evenly.

“What do you want to do?”

Magnus closed his eyes for a moment, centering himself and letting the glamor slip back onto his golden irises. “I want to go and have a look around. With a team I trust. I just –“

He didn’t have to finish. Things had improved in the Shadow World, but he still couldn’t entirely trust a random institute to put their efforts into investigating a warlock-adjacent death.

“I’ll call Izzy. We’ll make it work.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Mama?”

He was scared as he entered the room, even before he saw what it held. Later, he couldn’t say what it was that caused his fear. One day, he would grow up to be Magnus Bane, High Warlock and one of the most powerful magic users in the world, but foresight was not among his gifts, and he knew nothing of his future. At this time, he had two names. His mother called him Asmara, which meant love. His father, when he was there, called him Willem, which was Dutch.

He froze, staring, at the sight, all thought driven from his mind as he tried to parse what he was seeing. He had expected to find his mother sitting up at his voice, looking at him and smiling, telling him that everything was alright and that he was silly for being scared. That nothing bad was going to happen to them, beyond the everyday bad that was to be expected and didn’t even deserve a special mention.

She was there alright, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was never going to look at anyone again. A keris blade was protruding from her chest, her nightgown stained dark red with blood.

He heard the scream before he realized it was coming from his own mouth.

Then words, in his father’s voice angry, rushing from his lips, and the boy who would become Magnus Bane struggled for a moment to understand them – not because of the language the man spoke. His father’s Dutch was as familiar to him as his mother’s native Indonesian, though he was only allowed to speak that when his father wasn’t around to hear, and no one around who would betray them to him. His father didn’t like it when his son talked like a native.

It was the words themselves, the curses, and the accusations. For a moment, comprehension refused to come, and when it did, a feeling he had never experienced before came into being inside him, expanding and leaving his insides feeling cold and hard as steel… just like the steel that—

At that moment, overwhelmed by what he would later come to identify as fury and hatred, the boy reached for the fiery core inside him, the thing that let him, sometimes, do things that no other could. The thing his mother called his gifts, though she had made him swear time and time again to never use them when anyone was around to see – and least of all him, the man who came to spend time with them when his days at the trading post wearied him, whom he dutifully called father although he did none of the things any of the other fathers he knew did.

The fire grew, and he shaped it into a missile, casting it at the source of the anger and the hate, the accusations, and the vile words between them.

*

The apartment had been sealed again after the team from the local institute had come through. Magnus ran his fingers along the tape, magic sparkling as it came free. Why was that even still there? Its mere presence told him that he was not the only one who suspected something more than the obvious was going on. Investigations did not seem to be closed yet after all.

Another spell, and the lock of the door clicked open to let them enter.

Alec was by his side, a comforting presence. Isabelle came behind them, with Jace and Simon trailing. If there was anything to be seen or found, they would find it. If there wasn’t, he would let it go.

How likely is it that you will? A small voice in his mind taunted him.

How likely is it that a death mirroring my own mother’s so precisely occurs by accident? He shot back.

The door closed with a click.

“Right,” Alec said, breaking the silence that enveloped them. “Magnus? Do you want to--?”

He nodded, magic once again sparkling around his hands. “I’m checking the place for demonic traces or residues of magic. There’ll be some from the girl I’m sure – Catarina started teaching her a while ago. I’m looking for anything that _doesn’t_ fit her signature.”

“Is it going to disturb your spell if we go ahead to where she was found?” Izzy asked.

Magnus didn’t interrupt the gestures that would call up his spell. “Go ahead,” he said. “The faster we’re done here, the better.”

He’d wanted to come so badly, wanted to see the place and confirm for himself that this was nothing but a freak coincidence. Really, what else _could_ it be? Now that he was here, though, he would have rather been anywhere else.

It must have been the photo, the image still lingering in his mind. Somehow, he felt as if his nine-year-old self was hovering close enough to pass his fear and horror at the sight of his dead mother on to the adult. There was a feeling of doom in the air, a strange pressure like a vise constraining his heart and laying an ever tighter band around his head, causing a pain that was more metaphysical than physical and yet impossible to ignore.

He’d felt that once before, he realized. This very feeling was what had made him get up that day and go in search of his mother even though he was too old to go running for consolation at a nightmare – which surely must have been what had happened. He hadn’t remembered that feeling, at least not consciously, until just then. The horror that had followed had blotted it out.

Now it came, a ghost from the past.

Magnus pushed it away, his mind disciplined enough to not be distracted from the spell.

Soft white light emanated from his hands, spreading out and growing until it touched the walls, seeping into every object in the room.

In most places, it disappeared immediately upon contact. In a few, it persisted.

None of those traces gave him any reasons for concern, however. They were entirely consistent with the magical marks left by a junior warlock just coming into her power.

He moved from room to room, following the billows of magic while Alec prowled the apartment, mentally recording anything he saw and backing up his recall with photographs on his phone. While they didn’t know what they were looking for – if they were looking for anything to begin with – anything could turn out to be of relevance.

The other three were standing in the bedroom, gathered around the bed. Someone had stripped it to the mattress, which showed an ugly stain.

“That was a lot of blood,” Izzy was saying just as Magus entered.

He stared at the dark, dried blotch. Was there a small wisp of his spell hanging on it? If so it was so thin that it was hard to make out for certain.

“She stabbed herself in the heart,” Magnus noted. “Of course there was a lot of blood.”

Izzy made a vague noise but didn’t elaborate.

“We’ve got what we’re going to get from this place,” she noted. “No residual demonic energy. No traces of any intruder that we can determine. We’re ready to leave when you are.”

“Right,” Magnus said, casting a last glance at the bed. Though he thought he could still see the shimmer, he was fully aware that he wanted to find something badly enough for his mind to play tricks on him if he wasn’t careful. “I’ll get us a portal home.”

*

“So,” Magnus said once they were all seated around the low table in the Lightwood-Bane living room a little later, cradling coffee cups. “I’m just being silly about this because I’ve had a similar situation in my past. Is that the general consensus?”

He caught Alec’s look, which told him that his husband thought that that was exactly what was happening. He didn’t look reproachful or derisive, though, and that was something.

To their shared surprise, Isabelle shook her head.

“Not necessarily. Can we see the photos you got? The ones from the fresh scene?”

Handing her his phone, Magnus watched as she and Simon both studied the images, then passed them on to Jace.

“This is a lot of blood,” the blond Shadowhunter observed.

Magnus resisted the urge to roll his eyes. They had determined that already, and no one was going to claim differently.

Before he could say anything, Izzy elaborated. “Let’s assume she stabbed herself through the heart,” she said. “Or rather, close enough to the heart to kill herself. Yes, you’d get blood but,” she gestured, mimicking what she was describing, “the blade itself would staunch the flow. That’s why if you get stabbed on duty, you leave the blade in place until you can get medical help – unless it’s poisoned, of course – because your chances of bleeding to death are that much lower while there’s something blocking all that blood from flowing out. In this case, she would have bled to death either way, but – internally, rather than by spilling everything on her bed.”

Alec had sat up straighter, his eyes piercing his sister as she spoke. Magnus’ in turn narrowed. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that she was stabbed and then someone moved the blade. Twisted it, jiggled it, whatever. And this happened while she was still alive and her heart was beating, because once the heart stops, you don’t get blood flow like that anymore. If she rammed the blade into her own chest, she’d have no reason to do that – and probably no opportunity to either.”

“She could have tried to pull it back out,” Alec suggested carefully.

“In which case she would have succeeded. It wasn’t stuck in bone or anything – at least not based on the files you forwarded from Cat.” She mimed stabbing, then dropping her hand, the fingers till closed around the imaginary grip.

“Also,” Simon threw in, “why a blade through the heart? That seems dramatic and… atypical. Mundanes prefer to go for the wrist if they try to kill themselves – though a lot of people know by now that that won’t work. But then she would have cut her throat. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone stabbing themselves to death like this. Not in our day and age.”

“Stabbing herself through her clothes seems odd, too,” Jace pointed out. “And she must have known the kid would find her. There didn’t seem to be anyone else living in that apartment. That seems… cruel, for a mundane.”

Alec put his hand out, for the briefest moment touching his _parabatai’_ s arm. Magnus could only suspect that Jace was thinking about Valentine, in the guise of Michael Wayland, faking his own death in front of his adopted son’s eyes. He certainly wouldn’t have cared.

“The blade,” Izzy went on. “Where did it come from? Was it hers? Her place was modern. What I can see of the knife in the picture looks old. “

“I didn’t see anything missing,” Alec told her. “I was looking if anything had been disturbed. If it had a place in the apartment, it wasn’t where you’d notice if it was gone. But there were some perfectly good, large knives in the kitchen. Why use that one specifically?”

“Might the mundane police have cleaned up and straightened things?” Magnus inquired.

Simon frowned at him. “Only if they were really shitty at their job.”

“There’s only one way to know for sure if that knife belonged to the mother,” Izzy said. “And I’d rather avoid that. Mundane kids aren’t used to death at eleven, and she won’t have been prepared for this.”

Magnus refrained from pointing out that Shadowhunter children were far less prepared for ‘this’ than she seemed to believe. “If we could get our hands on the actual knife, though, maybe we could try tracking its owner.”

“You don’t think this is a crazy idea?” Magnus asked, a sweep of his hand encompassing everything about their miniature investigation. “That I’m making all of this up because my mother died in the same way?”

The woman shook her head. “I don’t know what’s going on here, or why someone would want to draw your attention to a murder in this manner, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think suicide is the most probable answer here.”

“Wait,” Alec said, putting his cup down. “You think someone did this to get Magnus’ attention?”

“Why else go to such lengths?” she asked pragmatically. “Alec, can you talk to the Institute and ask them to use whatever options they have to get their hands on that knife? We can go from there. I’ll talk to Catarina in the meantime. She got her hands on the report she sent to Magnus somehow. Maybe she can help us get something more. Such as a complete autopsy record. And I’d rather not have to question the child, but if she’s shared anything…”

“Right.” Alec rose, reaching for his phone on the table. “I’ll make a call or three.”

“One more thing,” Jace said.

Magnus looked at him, for a moment almost surprised that he was there. He’d gotten so used to Jace Herondale commanding any room he was in that he barely felt present when he was acting as quietly as he had since Clary had left them, even if it was objectively close to most people’s involvement.

Upon Magnus’ nod to continue, the other man said: “You have the other blade, right? Any chance we could have a look?”

For a moment, he was about to object, to tell him he didn’t need the blade that had killed his mother to investigate this new murder. It wasn’t something he generally showed around – and less so since Camille had stolen the blade from him. Still, he had asked them to work on a case they had no reason to be interested in, merely based on the fact of certain parallels… he guessed they had a right to see the keris.

“It’s alright,” Simon said. “I remember what it looks like.”

The three Shadowhunters stared at him in surprise.

Magnus sighed. “I don’t know how this will help,” he admitted. “But I’ll get it.”

“How did _you_ see that dagger?” Alec demanded from the Daylighter as Magnus left the room.

“We went to Camille’s house that day. He saw--” he could just hear the beginning of the response as the door closed behind him.

“I should have just deleted that message the moment it came in,” Magnus muttered under his breath, but his heart wasn’t really in it. He hated the memories, hated the feelings they stirred up, hated the feeling of loss they still brought – yet he was all too aware that if this had, indeed, been work of someone trying to draw his attention, it had not only worked, but done so at the expense of an innocent life. The least he could do was contribute all he could to making sure that life would be avenged.

He unlocked the case he kept the keris in and carefully lifted the blade off its holder.

For a moment, the image of his mother, dead on her bead, her head fallen to the side, her hands dropped from where they had pushed the dagger into her own heart, appeared before his mind’s eye again.

For a fraction of a second, he thought he heard her voice, calling to him.

 _Asmara_ …

It had been centuries since he’d heard that word directed at him. It didn’t even feature in his dreams. He barely dreamt of her anymore anyway, and when he had, it had been other things. She’d been angry in those dreams, furious at him for ruining her life. At other times, she’d been frightened, scared of the powers her offspring was manifesting, his golden cat’s pupil eyes. Sometimes, his dream-mother had ranted at him, blaming him for her death, and that of his father, too.

Well, at least the latter he deserved.

Hesitating before returning to the others, he studied the wavy blade. It wasn’t anything close to identical to the weapon that had caused the more recent woman’s death, but he could see some parallels. Its slimness, for one.

There was something still nagging at the back of his mind. He thought about it as he slowly made his way back to the others, hoping not to return until they had finished their discussion of the foray he and Simon had gone on to Camille’s home.

Something wasn’t adding up.

He focused, forcing his mind to stay on the matter. He’d spent so much time in the last four hundred years forcefully forgetting about anything connected to his mother’s death that it was hard to not fall into old habits.

It hit him so hard the instant his hand reached for the door handle that he froze in mid-motion, his breath painfully caught in his throat for a moment.

Slowly, deliberately, he turned the handle and rejoined the others, carefully placing the blade on the table between them.

“This is it,” he said. “But Isabelle is wrong.”

“Wrong?” Alec asked, his eyes narrowed. “About what?”

“This wasn’t done to draw my attention.”

He couldn’t sit back down right now. The turmoil in his mind translated to a restlessness that didn’t stand for the calmness of a seat. Instead, he stood behind his chair, hands on the backrest.

“What do you mean?” Izzy asked. “You said it mirrored your mother’s death—”

Magnus nodded impatiently. “It did. It does. But no one could have set it up to look that way because no one knew. I didn’t – I locked the memory away in my mind, I refused to even think of it myself. The only person I shared any details with was Alec, and we can safely exclude _him_ as the perpetrator.” He gave a helpless laugh. “I can even give him an alibi if you need one.” Humor may not have been called for in this situation, but for the moment, it felt like the only thing between him and a void he really didn’t care to go to. His voice was urgent as he repeated: “ _No one could have set this up because no one knew what to set up_.”

“Camille…” Simon suggested. “She could have talked to someone.”

“Camille knew my mother died by that dagger,” Magnus informed him. “She didn’t know where or how—as you just pointed out, few suicides go for the heart.”


	3. Chapter 3

She should have known.

It was what she told herself time and time again in the days and weeks after she had come to realize that something about her son was not quite the way it should be.

Maybe, on some level, she had.

At six years old, her son had duties and chores around the house, like every other child in every other family along the river. More so, really, because where most families had two adults, the man in their household was notably missing most of the time – and when he wasn’t, he certainly wasn’t there to pull his own weight and do his fair share of the work.

It was alright, she told herself. She’d know what she was getting into when she’d agreed to be his wife – his native wife, his colony wife, to keep him company and keep him entertained while his Dutch wife, his real wife, was far away, waiting for him to come home to her, and his real, Dutch children who bore his name and would one day enter his trade and succeed him in the business.

Maybe if she told herself often enough, she would believe it some day. She had known what she was getting into alright. She’d also known she didn’t have a choice. She’d known that she could either agree, and get a little something out of it for herself – a little bit of safely, and a pouch of coin that he made sure she received at intervals so that she could maintain a certain standard of living. Let no one say he was letting his mistress dwell in poverty.

The thought almost made her laugh. It wasn’t about her, or her standard of living, as much as it was about him wanting to come home – which was what he called it, even though he never spent more time with them than it took to get his fill of her – to something that fit his sense of aesthetic more than the peasant’s hovel he had first found her in. He also didn’t want her to ruin her beauty or her body by doing those chores she had no husband to take over.

Nothing to spoil his enjoyment.

Even with a maid to help in the house and a boy to tend the animals they had and take care of any heavy lifting, though, there was plenty of work left for her to do, and to share with her son.

Her son, but not his.

He didn’t know, though sometimes she thought he suspected, based on how he looked at the boy. Maybe that was just because he didn’t like the idea that there was a potential competitor for his other sons, the ones he couldn’t stop talking about once he started. The sons who made him proud.

This one was too young to be useful, and most of all very clearly half-native.

He was smart, though, picking up his father’s Dutch with ease and even correcting her own by now if she slipped with the foreign words. Though he surely didn’t plan to give him any prominent position in his business later in life, his father had paid for a tutor, and the boy she only called Willem when her Dutch husband was around read well and wrote tolerably, she was told.

She hadn’t thought much of the day he had been conceived, until she’d come outside one day to see him at his chores of washing up, and watched the sparkling light forming around his small hands as he was rubbing on stains that should have been burnt in to the point of being permanent fixtures on the pan.

She’d watched him thereafter, spotting more of those occasions, happening when he was trying hard to get a thing done, or when he was very deeply invested in getting something.

That was when she’d started really thinking about that night, that day before her husband had left to board a ship and take a hold full of cargo home to be sold for a profit greater than she could imagine.

He’d left, coolly bidding his goodbye and reminding her that he would be gone a while. It was months until he would reach Europe, months again before he would return. Every time he made that voyage, she wondered if he would. There were many reasons why he might not. His ship might sink; his customers might have lost interest in wares from this place, causing him to go elsewhere to acquire more merchandise next time; his Dutch wife might convince him to stay home this time, send someone else in his place…

It was an outcome she half-hoped for and half-dreaded.

As always, he reminded her that she’d have to make do with the money he left with her do until he returned. She could do that. She was alone then, and she was perfectly able to keep her own household even if it didn’t need to live up to his ideas of propriety.

Then, when she wasn’t expecting it, he’d come back.

She should have known something was off at that very moment. He never came back once he had left.

He never sat down with her to eat either. That was something he’d only really started since the boy was old enough to listen to him, and it seemed more about impressing his son than about dining with her. He had that day, though, and while he had seemed just a little off that night, she’d put it down to whatever drink he’d already had, and maybe a little to his knowledge that he was going to miss her while he was gone. Expecting him to be worried that she might find another, local husband in the meantime would have been ridiculous, of course.

That night, he stayed with her, sharing her bed as usual when he did, and yet had been a very different man. She knew his habits well after all this time, knew what he liked and what he wanted from her. That was no different.

He certainly didn’t complain. He was happy enough with what she gave him.

The thing that stood out was that that night, for the first and last time in the years of their relationship, or agreement, or whatever one wanted to call it, he had given back. She’d thought back at that night with a smile on her face later, and told herself it was because she knew it was the night she’d conceived her son.

The morning after, he stayed for breakfast, joking and smiling, kissing her one last time before he departed.

By the time he returned, her boy had been born.

He was a fine boy, and if his eyes were strange, then what did you expect of a child half Dutch and half Indonesian? Somehow, she managed not to think of the fact that none of the other children of mixed heritage had eyes that sparkled golden ever so often, increasingly settling on that color as they grew older.

She’d found ways to explain away for herself anything that she needed to, but she couldn’t find any explanation for the light and the chores doing themselves, the neighbor’s prized fruit showing up in their pantry through a closed door, or any of the other small things that had happened, other than the obvious.

She took him aside. She asked him about it. And when he told her he didn’t know how he was doing it, that they were things that merely _happened_ when he was focused on a thing, she told him it was a talent few people had; that it was something he got from her people, not his father’s, and that his father would not be happy to see any of it.

He promised to be careful, to not want anything strongly enough around him. In turn, she promised to find him a teacher when his father next went to his faraway homeland. The Europeans left their mark and their priests and their prohibitions on the things her people had taken for granted for a long time, but there were still plenty of men and women following their own ways, and practicing their own rituals, around that she was sure she’d find a master to hone her son’s talent easily enough.

Just as she thought about what her husband would call it if he ever found out, as she imagined him screaming about witches and devils, did the realization hit her.

There were tales of women visited by spirits in the guise of their husbands, or even just a pretty young suitor come to have his way with them. Women who would, after nine months, give birth to children that were only half human.

What better time for one of them to come than a night on which the husband was not expected back for long enough to blur memories of when exactly the last night together had happened, of what had been said or not, or done or not?

With the understanding came concern. She didn’t know who her son’s father was, but she was pretty certain that she now knew who he wasn’t. What, she wondered, would happen if he ever figured it out as well?

Nothing good – that was for certain. A beating surely, for her, if not for the boy, if she could convince him that he hadn’t known or suspected and kept the knowledge from him. That was if she was lucky. If she wasn’t…

That didn’t bear thinking on, at least not while her son was too young to hold his own, because even the limited inheritance he might be getting would be lost to him then.

She locked the knowledge away in her mind, shoved it down as far as it would go. She couldn’t betray herself by accident, for the sake of her son as well as herself.

He was harder to tolerate after that either way. She hadn’t realized just how much she’d clung to the memory of that one night and morning that they had spent as a husband and wife should.

*

Magnus blinked, forcefully shaking off the images and the thoughts that weren’t his.

What was he doing, standing here daydreaming things that were at best ridiculous and at worst bordering on insane?

He shouldn’t have been surprised. He hadn’t slept well after getting Catarina’s first message, and he hadn’t slept at all the night before, tossing and turning and eventually rolling out of bed and hiding in the living room so as not to wake up Alec.

Again, that was, because he already had twice that night.

That was when he had realized that he hadn’t put the dagger back where it belonged after Alec’s siblings and Simon had left. Alec had done his best to distract him instantly, and he had taken what was offered without a second thought, glad for a moment’s reprieve.

That had led to him walking into the living room to find the keris on the table, reflecting the light from the candles he’d lit with a wave of his hand. His lips tightening at the thought of touching that thing again, he had picked it up, carrying it to its display to lock it safely behind the glass again.

And there he had stopped, the dagger still in his hand, his mind wandering back to those days of his childhood in Indonesia, a time of which he remembered little before that fateful day when he felt a strangeness and had gone to investigate.

Somehow, his brain had conjured up a memory of his mother, the way he would have wanted her to be: accepting of him, happy to have this strange son no matter the identity of his father. He knew better, of course. She hadn’t accepted his half-human nature. It had driven her to despair until she’d seen no other way out than to ram a dagger into her own heart. She had—

He fought the images bubbling in his mind, dropped the keris into its case rather than carefully placing it there, and not bothering to fix the way it was set up to make it look like a prized exhibit rather than the object of horror that it was.

The glass of the display case made a dangerous sound when he slapped the front closed. The key caught in the lock for a moment as suddenly trembling hands weren’t turning it as smoothly as they should have.

Focusing on slamming the doors in his mind just as hard, turning the locks on them, throwing the latch, and the deadbolt, and then barring them with whatever else he could find, Magnus turned to walk back out the room.

Usually, it was enough.

Today wasn’t usual, however, and he’d barely made it to the door when the image once again stood before him, in stark, garish colors, the red of her blood on her white nightgown, the dagger protruding from her chest, and—

Blood was running down from it, dripping, staining the bright fabric a dark, angry color.

 _She’d have bled to death internally_ , he heard an echo of Izzy’s voice. _Someone stabbed her and then moved the blade._

He quickly did the math to figure out what time it was in New York. He had to talk to Isabelle.

*

“I thought you were asleep.” Magnus sounded as sheepish as he felt.

He’d returned to the living room to get his phone which he’d left there on everyone’s recommendation to reduce the urge to keep checking for messages, to find Alec there, waiting for him. Normally, the sight of the 6’3 of Shadowhunter clad only in his shorts would have made his heart beat faster and his mind supply a few ideas of what they could do to put the rest of the night to good use.

Right now, the only thing he could think of was that he’d interrupted his rest.

“I was,” Alec said. “Then I woke up and you were gone. Magnus…” he closed the distance between them, one hand moving forward to touch Magnus’ arm, carefully as if ready to draw back if the touch wasn’t welcome. “We’re past the solitary brooding and figuring things out on our own, aren’t we? Talk to me.”

Magnus couldn’t help a small chuckle as he allowed himself to melt against Alec’s chest. “I know,” he whispered. “Old habits, though…” He shook himself, his thoughts snapping back to the situation at hand. “I realized something just then. I need to talk to Isabelle. We… may be operating under incorrect assumptions.”

“Incorrect assumptions?” Alec studied him, interested without judging. “What do you mean?”

He barely dared utter the words. There was too much connected to the idea. If the suspicion he had just had turned out to be correct, he had lived most of his life on the basis of … maybe not a lie, but a mistake. He didn’t quite dare let his mind go there just then. He wasn’t sure what he’d do with the information. He wasn’t sure what he’d do if it turned out he’d been wrong all along. He was even less sure of what he’d do if it turned out that he’d been right, after the opposite had, even for a moment, become a possibility.

“If your sister was right about the blood…” His voice was only a hair’s breadth above a whisper. “Then maybe my mother never killed herself.”


	4. Chapter 4

They were once again assembled, this time foregoing the living room and using the dining table instead. There was just more space on it, and Izzy had brought the printouts she’d made of anything Magnus had forwarded to her.

Catarina had joined them, too. She had two warlock girls living with her now, both of them fast asleep. She’d set a spell to alert her if that should change.

She had listened to their summary of the situation, then spent a moment mulling it over in silence.

“They asked Lara about whether her mother had shown any signs of depression or similar,” she offered eventually. “Not in those words, of course, but that’s what they meant. I was there when they talked to her. Nothing of what she said suggested that there was any reason for concern. To be quite honest, I don’t think  _ they _ liked the idea of calling it a suicide, but since with no signs of an intruder, no fingerprints anywhere – including the blade knife – and everything looking pretty undisturbed, there wasn’t much else to call it. But as you said: a dagger to the heart isn’t typically a suicide.”

“No,” Alec said. “More like an execution. Did they happen to ask her if the knife belonged to her mother?”

The warlock nodded. “They did, and she was certain she’d never seen it before.”

“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t her mother’s,” Simon threw in. “Mundanes don’t necessarily let their children that close to something that dangerous.”

“So the blade may still have been in the apartment to begin with, but we don’t know that it was,” Izzy concluded. “Magnus – what about the keris? Was that your mother’s?”

He looked at her blankly for a moment. That was another thing he’d never spared any thought on.

“I don’t know,” he admitted eventually. “I—they’re expensive things, especially the ones worked in the manner this one is. They were made by master craftsmen. They would be worn for ceremonies. People had them as heirlooms. It’s entirely possible that she had this put away somewhere and never had any reason to show me. Or she may have, and I don’t remember. I was nine, and it was centuries ago. My memory of that time is not what it could be.”

That was, in fact, why he had originally asked Catarina to attend. You couldn’t cast a memory spell on yourself very well, and he felt that it might become necessary.

“Your mother,” Izzy asked. “How was she in the time before her death?”

Magnus gave a small shrug. “As I just said, my memory is blurry. I don’t – I remember her being different. I was worried. I don’t think I knew just what I was worried about, exactly. Maybe that she’d cast me out, for being how I was? What I was? I didn’t even know what that was myself then.”

“Did she say so?”

The voice from his earlier daydream pushed itself into his mind again, and he heaved a sigh as he met Isabelle’s eyes to answer. “I’m sorry. I—between the lack of sleep and the stress and wanting to get to the bottom of this, I’m afraid I let my imagination get the better of me tonight, and it’s even harder to sort memory from wishful thinking now. I don’t  _ think _ I remember her saying anything of the kind, but it seemed clear enough in retrospect. My father certainly said it when he walked in and saw her dead and me standing before her bed.”

“Magnus.” Alec’s voice was gentle but firm, his eyes apologetic. “I’m sorry, but – I’ve been wondering. When you first told me about all of this –” he gestured vaguely, referring to the keris and the death of his parents on that long-ago day, “I thought you couldn’t control your magic at the time, and you said that you could. How did you learn – that much control at nine years old?”

“I had a tutor.” The words coming out of his mouth surprised Magus, even though he had, of course, known that. He just hadn’t thought of it. Some of that daydream suddenly made more sense. “There was a … magic user – I guess a warlock probably? I don’t know. I didn’t know what a warlock was then. He lived outside of the village where we had our home, a bit away from the river. I went to him for lessons when – when my father wasn’t around. During the months he spent on his ship.” Because his father couldn’t ever know that magnus had inherited skills from his mother’s people that his father’s didn’t have. That was what she’d told him. For a moment, he wasn’t sure if he was making that up because of the earlier ramblings of his mind, or if his thoughts had gone there because that was what had happened. He settled on the latter. He  _ had _ received lessons, and they  _ had _ been kept secret from his father – or the man he had thought of as his father in any case. The fireball that had incinerated the man without burning down the entire building was proof of that.

So if his mother had gotten him lessons for his magic, she surely hadn’t been as desperate about his nature as his father had suggested… had she?

He realized that Izzy had been talking to him – at him, really, since he hadn’t parsed a word of what she’d said.

“Sorry,” he told her. “Come again? I was… distracted.”

Somehow, she managed not to look exasperated. “Can you tell us about finding your mother?” she asked, her voice kind. “I realize it’s hard on you, but any details might help.”

Wrestling own the desire to refuse, Magnus moved his head slowly up and down once, indicating his agreement. Something cool touched his hand, and as he glanced at it, he saw that Alec had pushed a glass of water over. Whether it was to lubricate his voice or to buy him another moment to compose himself, it was welcome either way.

He took a slow, deliberate sip and closed his eyes, forcing his mind to allow the memory to come.

*

It was late. He wasn’t supposed to be coming home this late. It was dark out already. Dark meant dangerous. There were predators out, both the four-legged kind that would eat you, and the two-legged sort that would take you to sell you to the highest bidder.

He should have been more scared than he was, but he was walking home with all the invincibility of a nine-year old aware that he had an ace or three up his sleeve.

No, Magnus realized as he let the memory engulf him. He wasn't supposed to be out  _ at all _ . He had snuck away earlier that day, to find his teacher. He wasn’t  _ supposed _ to go there while his father was around.

He‘d been scared, the first time his mother had taken him to the man. He hadn’t known what to expect. Oh, he’d seen him around, of course. All the children had. They made a game of it. If you snuck up on him and looked at him from the corner of your eye, just  _ so _ , and without him noticing it, he seemed to have a circle of small, slightly curved horns all around his head.

Magnus had learned many things since then, things that made him feel just a bit superior and more than a little smug towards the other children, though he tried not to show it too much. For one thing, he knew that those horns were real. For another, he knew that there was no sneaking up on his teacher. If the children caught a glimpse of his Mark, they did so because he allowed it. It amused him as much as it did them. And in the end – in the end those horns were no different from Magnus’ own golden, slit-pupiled eyes, which were looking brown, like everyone else’s, more often than not these days because he was learning the same trick of concealing them.

“Among our own people,” his teacher had told him, “we would not need to appear as we are not. Before your father’s people came, what we can do was honored, and valued. Things have changed. They may change again some day, but until then we must be cautious. They have been known to try and destroy us.”

He hadn’t said it to scare the child, but as an honest warning that the boy knew he needed to heed. He also knew it was why he wasn’t supposed to walk outside the lonely cottage in the forest while his father was around.

But he’d been in town for weeks, and Magnus was missing those lessons. Also, he had questions.

So he had gone, in secret, and then he had forgotten the time, and now his mother would surely know he hadn’t just been out to play. In the worst case, his father would be there, and waiting for him. That would mean he’d be angry at both of them – him, for having run off, and his mother, for not preventing it. His father wasn’t a lenient man, and Magnus knew well enough what a through beating felt like.

He didn’t look forward to it, but he knew from hard experience, that drawing things out would make them worse.

And so, hoping that it was only going to be his mother’s displeasure that he would have to face, he’d gone in. It wasn’t that his mother never beat him when he was disobedient, but she was far more restrained about it.

He wasn’t quite sure why that was the case. He’d overheard a conversation between her and a friend, who had recommended a harder hand when she’d seen him lazing about most of the day. Little did she know that he could finish the chores that should have filled thet afternoon well in time for dinner, and have time to spare to wash up.

“I’m not sure his father would approve,” his mother had said, with that strange tone of voice that suggested that what she was saying was not quite what her words meant.

Her friend had nodded slowly, contemplating the words and, for all intents and purposes, agreeing.

He’d thought it over, time and time and time again, trying to make it make sense. He couldn’t exactly ask his mother – not without admitting that he had used one of the tricks he had learned to eavesdrop on her. He didn’t think that would go over too well. But what had she meant about his father not approving of her handling him more strictly? If anything, his father would have been in full support of that suggestion!

He’d put it out of his mind, which was the sensible thing to do with questions you couldn’t find an answer to. Answers tended to show up at a later time, when you weren’t particularly looking.

Right now, it was mostly the hope of getting off lightly that had brought it back to mind.

Their house lay still and dark as he approached. Now, that was strange. He wasn’t  _ that _ late.

Silently pushing the door open, making sure he looked adequately contrite about his late appearance, he stopped in his tracks.

He’d been apprehensive before, worried of what was to come. The moment he set foot into the building, a cold feeling seized his heart, squeezing with a dread he hadn’t ever experienced outside of the nightmares children had from time to time.

The house lay silent. For the briefest moment, he thought he had smelled a strange tang in the air.

All his senses were on high alert now. Grateful for his eyes that allowed him to see well enough in the dark, he crept forward, the need to find out what was going on battling the desire to run.

“Mama?” he called out carefully as he snuck across the room, soft-soled boots padding silently on the wood floor. Someone at the market had once suggested sending him to the dancers, based on the natural grace with which he moved even without any training at all.

His father wouldn’t hear any of that. He’d cursed in Dutch, and threatened the man who’d been impertinent enough to talk to him out of turn. His father, it seemed, didn’t approve of dancing.

That wasn’t quite right, of course. He vastly approved of dancing when it was the young women in the village doing the dancing and he had his merchant friends watching and leering and shouting out suggestions on what they could do. He knew that because one night he had found a single hair on his father’s coat when he had put it up for the maid to brush out before morning.

He’d pocketed it, planning to try out a scrying spell he’d just learned. So far, he had only used it to track animals, to see where they had wandered off so he could go and get them without having to keep an eye on them all day.

It’d been a few days later that he’d gotten the opportunity, and while the spell had worked, he hadn’t liked what he’d seen. The dancing had been nice enough, even with the men shouting their rude remarks, and comments that he was certain  _ would _ earn him a proper beating if his mother ever heard them out of his own mouth. What had come after, though…

He’d broken the spell quickly enough then, but he’d still found it hard to face the woman who had featured in the events when he encountered her in the village, or in the market, or anywhere around. Sometimes, he thought that it must be obvious that he had seen things not intended for his eyes. No one ever said anything, though, and he managed to put the knowledge aside after a while, locking it away in his mind far enough to make sure he wasn’t going to betray himself.

“Mama?”

Still silence in the house. Where was she? Where was the maid? Where—

He pushed open the door to her bedroom, slipping inside like a small shadow, pausing just long enough on the threshold to make sure that  _ he _ wasn’t also there.

“Mama!” There she was, already in bed, fast asleep…

The thought barely finished, a ray of light caught his eye, just enough to throw the scene before him into stark relief, and he heard the noise, wanting to slam his hands over his ears to blot it out, seconds before he realized that it was  _ his _ voice,  _ his _ scream, coming out of  _ his _ mouth, because his mother was not asleep at all.

Her entire body was limp on the bed, her head sunk sideways, and from her chest, just above where a river of dark red had drenched her night dress, protruded the wavy blade of a woman’s keris blade.

It was another sound that cut short his screams, and as he spun, a larger figure appeared behind him.

Dressed all in silks and velvets, his father stood towering in the door, blocking his way out.

He cast one fleeting glance at the scene before him, and when he looked at the boy, his eyes were filled with a hatred he had never, never seen this close up before – and certainly never directed at himself.

“Devil’s spawn,” his father hissed at him. “Look what you’ve done! She couldn’t bear to live, knowing she’d given birth to a monster! Should have drowned you when I first saw what you were! I will—”

*

“I called up fire and I killed him,” Magnus said, looking only at Alec. “Then I ran. I snatched up the dagger… Somehow, I thought that if I took the weapon, no one would know that her death was my fault – that it was my existence that had made her do it. it wasn’t a very sensible thought, looking at it now.”

“You were nine years old,” Alec pointed out. “And scared. No one expected you to be sensible then.”

The others nodded, confirming that they agreed with his assessment.

“Are you okay with a few questions?” Isabelle asked him after he’d had a moment to collect himself.

Now it was his turn to nod. “Go ahead.”

“You were home late,” she said. “Your mother was dressed for bed. Does that feel right to you? Shouldn’t she have – I don’t know? Been up waiting for you? Ready to go out and look for you if you didn’t return?”

He gave it a moment’s thought. “If he – if my step-father was right with what he said, I assume she didn’t want to go looking for me and would have been happy if I’d just disappeared. But we… we don’t know that anymore, do we?”

He closed his eyes again. Even now, his throat tightened and his heartbeat and breathing sped up as he recalled the image.

This time was worse, because he had to focus on every detail of that memory, dredging up every last bit of information that his mind had stored. When he was ready, he raised his hand, the finger movement accompanying the spell almost imperceptible.

A flash of light, and a polaroid-like photograph appeared, lodged safely between his first two fingers. He put it down on the table, allowing them to see firsthand what he had seen.

He marveled at it for a moment. His memory photographs were good any day of the week, but this one image was burned into his mind to the point where its reproduction looked as if – well, not as if his mother should start moving any moment, because she was very clearly dead, but certainly as if they should be able to smell the blood from where they sat.

It was only then, when he looked at the image outside of his mind, that he realized something else.

“She was waiting for her husband – my stepfather,” he said, a note of surprise in his voice. “I never realized—”

He pointed. “White silk and lace… This was a Dutch nightgown. She got it out when he came. She locked it away while he was gone.”

“He did show up right after you did,” Simon pointed out.

“Right. So she didn’t go look for me no matter what because if he’d come and found her gone, that wouldn’t have ended well for her. If he’d come and found her gone because of me, that wouldn’t have ended well for either of us.”

“She could have killed herself out of fear?” Alec suggested, the doubt in his voice turning it into a question.

“Not likely,” Isabelle said, her eyes never leaving Magnus. “Was stabbing a common suicide method for your mother’s people? Would it have been something that would be logical for her?”

He shook his head slowly. “I remember two villagers who took their own lives. Hangings. Both of them. I don’t remember any stabbing – any other stabbing – except for the sort that involves at least two people and a lot of anger over cheating of some kind or another.”

“What about her anatomy knowledge?” she continued.

When he didn’t respond immediately, she clarified: “Would she have been able to do this, even in theory? Stabbing through the heart is hard. There are all these ribs and stuff in the way to protect it. This blade looks thin, but she still would have had to fit it through the intercostal space to hit… Did she know where?”

He focused, trying to remember. What had his mother known of human anatomy? What could she have known?

“I don’t know,” he admitted, his voice quiet. “I don’t think so.”

Catarina leaned forward, her hands folded on the table. “Lara described a feeling of horror when she entered the apartment, way before she found her mother,” she said. “I could see they were marking it down to fabricated memory – brains do that. They make you think you remember things that didn’t happen based on knowledge you’ve gained since then. I might have assumed the same, but…” She disentangled her hands to gesture at Magnus. “You’ve just said pretty much the same thing, and you  _ couldn’t _ know I’d heard that already in the other case. I’m inclined to agree with Isabelle at this point: we’re not looking at suicides.”

“Agreed as well,” Alec said darkly. “Which begs the question: What  _ are _ we looking at?”

“Murder,” Izzy answered, just as Simon responded: “Executions.”

They looked at him, and he raised his hands half-apologetically before elaborating. “Nothing stolen, the woman from this week at least definitely wasn’t raped as per the reports, neither of them was found in a way that suggests she surprised a burglar, and a blade to the heart is not exactly your typical murder method either. There are things that are a lot faster to pull off, and require the victim to be a lot less cooperative. She doesn’t look like she has any defensive wounds from what I can see—” he indicated the photo, still on the table, “and the other one definitely didn’t. Also no signs of being restrained, but that doesn’t mean a lot because it could have been a warlock with a spell to hold them.”

“Or a vampire with an Encanto,” Jace suggested. Once, his voice would have held at least a playful edge. Now it was neutral, simply stating a fact.

“Nope,” the Daylighter disagreed. “Not with the amount of blood here, and no sign that anyone at least sampled a bit.

“Might still be murder,” Alec told them. “For putting pressure on someone else, or simply…” he gave Magnus a look that asked his husband’s forgiveness for what he was about to say, “…simply because they both had intercourse with demons, however involuntary that was.”

“We should try and see what the blades can tell us,” Izzy decided, stopping any further theories. “I’m waiting to hear back from someone about the recent one, but can we see yours again, Magnus?”

He nodded and rose wordlessly, going to get the keris. It probably hadn’t been out of its case this much since before Camille had stolen it.

His thoughts were focused on carefully monitoring himself as he carefully carried the dagger over to where the others were waiting. He didn’t  _ think _ he was going to suddenly drop into another bout of daydreaming, but with every minute that passed, he was less certain that that was what had happened. If magic had been in play, then it was very well possible that some of it had rubbed off on the dagger. Depending on what spell, or spells, had been used, maybe some flashes of memory were somehow bound to the metal, ready to come off if he wasn’t shielding himself well enough.

He offered it to Izzy hilt first.

Her fingers had barely closed around it when she jerked back her hand.

Magnus’ eyes narrowed, his own grip on the weapon tightening before it could clatter to the table.

“Wow,” Izzy said. “That was different from last night. I don’t think it wants me to handle it.”

Seeing the others’ questioning looks, she elaborated: “I just felt as if – something – was shoving me away. Hard. And it didn’t feel happy. Magnus—”

His head was already moving from side to side in a shake. “I feel absolutely nothing out of the ordinary,” he informed her.

“Right.” Izzy scowled at the keris, then schooled her features into something neutral before looking back at Magnus. “I suggest we wait and see what the other knife does. In the meantime—”

“Do we know they’re the only ones?” Catarina interrupted her before she could lay out her plans.

All eyes turned to the warlock healer, and she continued: “We have two deaths with a similar method and environment, four hundred years apart. That’s a lot of time for more of them to happen.”

“I ran a search on the computer,” Alec told her. “First thing after I called everyone in. Didn’t find anything.”

“But the digital records don’t go that far back,” his sister pointed out. “Especially when only downworlders or downworlder-adjacent people were involved. We’d need to go to the archives for that…”

“I’ll do it,” her other brother volunteered so quickly that it was evident he had only waited for some task he could pick up to occupy his mind. “I’ll go to the archives instead of back to New York when we’re done here. If there’s anything to find, I’ll find it.”


	5. Chapter 5

She nodded at the vendor, taking the purchases the other woman had just wrapped up for her, and putting them away. The haggling had taken longer than usual. It was that time when she started to be more careful with her money, while trying not to cut down too much on what she could provide for her boy. With a bit of luck, her husband’s ship would arrive before things got scarce.

If it didn’t – well, it wasn’t as if that had never happened before.

She glanced around, looking for her son. He’d spotted some friends and asked permission to run over to them. She’d allowed it without much thought. He, too, was aware that the Dutch merchant vessels his father sailed on could be back any day now, and while he was old enough to be aware of where the coin that paid for his clothes and his tutor, and much of his food, came from, he also knew of the restrictions in his life while the man was around.

Her husband didn’t like it when his son associated with the local children, for one. For another, his other, special, tutoring had to be put on hold. The Dutch knew no magic, or spirits, or creatures other than humans and their strange, aloof, unpleasant angels that she hoped never to encounter, though she knew the word to say and the responses to provide, the motions to go through and the things to avoid to make the priests they brought happy – or at least sufficiently content enough to leave them alone. There was no telling what would happen if her husband ever found out where she was sending the boy when he wasn’t around.

She spotted him, standing with three other boys at the edge of the market, gesturing and talking animatedly. They seemed about to start a race, and she was secretly glad that he was dressed in the simplest linen clothes he had, owing to the heat as well as the fact that it allowed him what freedom a child his age could still have. His father would have thrown a fit if he’d seen the boy like that. He always insisted on proper attire, shirt buttoned up high and coat closed tightly on top. It may have been appropriate for the Netherlands, but it seemed like a sure way to get heat stroke here. Still, he suffered it for the sake of propriety, and he expected his son to follow suit.

That brought another thought to mind. He was almost nine now. Soon enough, he’d have outgrown the status of child. They’d need to look into finding an apprenticeship for him – and she could imagine what sorts of professions her husband would accept. At least his Dutch coin would pay any master’s fee easily enough.

There was another option, and she firmly forbade herself to think of that. Still, it kept worming its way back into her mind, as it had many times since she had first realized that the decision was imminent. What if he decided, against the odds, that his son was to be apprenticed to _him_? That, even with his obvious Indonesian heritage, he was to take some position in his trading house, that he was to learn the trade of a merchant? He’d sail again, and next time he would take the child. She wouldn’t see her boy for months – and if ever either his father or anyone there on the other side of the world found out what he was, she would probably never see him again at all.

“Yours?”

The voice startled her, pulling her out of her thoughts. She winced as she realized she’d been standing half-blocking the path between the stands as she looked over at the boys. Luckily, it was getting late enough that business was slowing down, or someone surely would have shoved her out of the way already.

She turned, finding herself facing another woman. With a smile, she nodded. “That one.” She gestured at her son, suddenly aware that there was no way to know which of the boys she meant at the distance.

The other woman didn’t seem to mind. “He’s a very special boy, isn’t he?” she asked.

They moved aside, as if by unspoken agreement, standing a little out of the way.

“That he is,” she agreed.

Mustering the other woman, she wondered how on earth she could have never noticed her before. There hadn’t been any Dutch ships for a while, so no one new had come to them from there. She must have been around for weeks. And she certainly had come with the merchants or the colonists. Even if the words she’d spoken had been in impeccable Indonesian, rather than in Dutch, there was no mistaking those looks. She was tall, with a curly mane of golden hair with a reddish tint, done up in one of those complicated hairstyles she couldn’t have ever hoped to achieve no matter how hard she tried. There was a hat perched on top of that, and the dress she wore was nothing if not an unsuccessful attempt of a colonist woman trying for a local look. The parasol she carried didn’t help.

“I haven’t been out much,” the other woman said without prompting, as if she’d read her thoughts. “I live with my brother, over at—” She gestured to where the wealthier colonists had their little and larger houses, built in that unique mix of their home styles and the practical requirements of the local climate. “As a governess for his children. Don’t have any of my own. He advised strongly against,” she lowered her voice conspiratorially, “mingling with the natives.”

She laughed in spite of herself. “And what do you think of the natives, now that you’re mingling?”

The blonde woman shrugged. “I haven’t had much of an opportunity to mingle yet,” she admitted. “I find all of this a little… overwhelming.”

“Don’t you mean to say primitive?” it came more harshly than she had intended.

The other woman looked taken aback. “Who said that?”

“Apologies.” She lowered her eyes briefly, taking a moment to focus. “My husband does not… approve greatly of our customs or people… He’d hate to think that I’m shopping in this market in his absence, but…” She gestured vaguely. “The money lasts longer here than among the Dutch merchants, and he wouldn’t approve of my running out either.”

“Your husband is Dutch?” That sounded surprised. She wondered if the other woman was sheltered enough to not realize that Dutch merchants and officers who came without their wives would take local wives to shorten their time in the colonies, with the chosen brides not getting a great lot of say in the matter if they didn’t wish to suffer consequences. “Currently away to sell his merchandise back in Europe. His ship is expected to return any day now.”

“His son then?” her new acquaintance asked, nodding towards where the boys were. They were glancing over now, clearly having noticed the strange lady talking to one of their mothers. “But I’m being rude. My name is Anabella.”

“His son indeed,” she confirmed. “I’m Siti.” Raising her hand, she drew the boys’ attention. “Willem!” She was always careful to use the name his father had given him out in public – even more so when chances of his arrival increased with every passing day.

Her son came running over, skidding to a halt just in time to not barge into either of them. Then he stepped back, looking up at Anabella with large eyes, apparently taking in her exotic beauty. The boy he executed was impeccable. Even his father would have been hard-pressed to find fault with it.

*

Alec found him still staring at the dagger.

“Alexander,” he said after a long pause that he had mostly spent slowly raising his eyes from the metal blade to his husband’s face. ”I… may be going insane over this.”

“No,” Alec told him, hoping that the finality in his voice sounded convincing. ”No you’re not.” He indicated the blade. “More memories?”

Magnus raised one shoulder in a half-shrug. “If so then not mine.”

Alec reached for the keris, slowly enough to give Magnus every opportunity to protest. When he didn’t he tugged the blade out of the other man’s hands and walked to the case where it belonged, carefully setting it down on its stand. It may have been merely a figment of his imagination, born from worries about Magnus and Izzy’s earlier comment, but he could have sword for just a moment before he released it that the blade was decidedly unhappy at being locked back up – and more than a little scared.

Deciding not to bring it up just then, he stood studying Magnus for another few heartbeats.

“C’mon,” he said eventually. “I’ll make us some tea. Tell me what you saw?”

*

“So… did it happen?” Alec asked, placing a steaming cup and a bowl of rock sugar in front of Magnus.

His husband helped himself to some of it, stirred, sampled the tea, and added some more.

Magnus heaved a sigh. “I’m not sure. I don’t – I’ve worked hard not to remember that time, you know. And digging it all back up through centuries of locking it away is… work.” He closed his eyes, a strained, focused expression on his face.

“I have no recollection of that day on the market, but it probably wasn’t all that important to me then either. I do think I remember the woman… Anabella. She ended up visiting Mama a few times. They had tea together, she brought some Dutch pastries once. I summoned one outside when they weren’t looking, shared it with the neighbor’s son. He didn’t see the summoning, of course.” He ventured a careful smile, then quickly grew somber again. “I didn’t much like her.”

“Any specific reason?” Alec asked, taking a slow, deliberate sip from his own cup without ever taking his eyes off of his husband.

Magnus gestured vaguely. “I didn’t like the way she looked at me. It was probably because I was mixed… plenty of people didn’t approve of that, on both sides. I don’t think I thought too much about it. it was about the same time that my mother changed.”

Alec sat up straighter at the last words. “Changed how?”

“She always was … different when she expected her husband to return. I never knew if she was hoping for it or dreading it. No, that’s wrong. I thought she was dreading it. I didn’t understand why – he was her husband, wives want their husbands to be back, right? Also, money got really tight towards the end there, every time. But I think she would have been happy enough if he’d never come back.”

Nodding encouragement to continue, Alec remained silent while Magnus sorted his thoughts.

“So, she was stressing about his return. But it wasn’t just that. I don’t know…, she was always tired. She ate less. She left the house only if she couldn’t avoid it. I remember those things. They fit with what my stepfather said, you know.”

Alec bobbed his head in a nod. He could about imagine how that had gone for young Magnus, thinking back on the last weeks – or months? – with his supposed father’s words still ringing in his ears.

Following a sudden thought, Alec fished out his phone and fired off a text to Catarina.

_Did your friend seem depressed these last few weeks?_

Knowing it would be a while before he could get an answer, he returned his attention to Magnus.

“Let us speculate a little,” he suggested. “Let’s assume what you’ve seen from the keris is true. Your mother knew her husband wasn’t your father, knew you were a warlock, and didn’t much mind. She got you the opportunity for training while her husband wasn’t there to see. She wasn’t that fond of him. Then this new person shows up, befriends her, and she seems to develop some kind of – let’s call it depression for lack of a more specific term right now. One day you come home to find her dead, with a blade in her heart that we don’t know for sure now was hers. Is there a chance you remember this Anabella woman enough for a…” he gestured, suggesting a memory photograph.

“Until a couple of hours ago, I would have said no,” Magnus admitted. “I can reproduce what I saw when I took the blade back.” He did so, not waiting for Alec’s confirmation

As the other man studied the picture, he continued: “Wild speculation: My mother didn’t kill herself. Anabella was somehow involved in her issues and the subsequent death. Maybe she wasn’t looking at me that way because she thought me half Dutch, or because I was half Indonesian, but because I was half demon. Maybe she was a warlock. Maybe she was some minor demon herself. She may have been draining my mother. But that makes no sense because why kill your energy source?”

“A magical drain can manifest as depression,” Alec pointed out. “She may still have taken her own life, for other reasons than you thought.” He was ignoring what his sister had said about the blood flow and the dagger being manipulated after insertion, or Magnus’ earlier admission that his mother probably hadn’t had the anatomical knowledge to find the heart, of all places. “What do we know about the keris daggers? They look unique, but is that all that’s to them?”

Magnus’ lips thinned for a moment. “They’re tools, and weapons, and ceremonial gear. Many people had them. I don’t—I’ve never done much research on them. Bad memories, you know.” He gave a dry laugh. “There’s little that beats really wanting to avoid a subject, is there?”

When Alec didn’t respond right away, he pulled out his own phone. “No time like the present to catch up on that. What do we have the internet for?”

It didn’t take them long to determine that _the Internet_ wasn’t going to help them a great deal. Keris daggers were popular – with mundanes playing some game or another. Other pages were more useful, but still clearly written by mundanes for mundanes.

“We might as well just portal to Indonesia and find someone who knows about these,” he eventually muttered, exasperation in his voice.

Alec did a double-take at those words.

“Well…” the word stretched and lengthened, extending like chewing gum. He came to a decision and added, far more clipped and decisive: “Let’s.”

Magnus studied him through narrowed eyes. “Like, now?”

Alec flipped open his phone and found the clock, quickly navigating to check the time difference. “They’re five hours ahead, so yes,” he agreed. “Do we have anything better to do?”

A small voice inside Magnus said that what they should have been doing was sleep, but he chose to ignore it. There wasn’t any way he was going to get much sleep this night either way. “Let’s take the keris, just in case we need to show it.”


	6. Chapter 6

They had spent the last hours hopping from place to place and becoming more familiar with the situation of public transport in Jakarta than either of them had ever expected to be. It wasn’t like they had much of a choice, though. You couldn’t portal where you had never been before.

A museum director who had grudgingly given them twenty minutes of her precious time had directed them to the address of a master manufacturer, citing the man as the person most likely to have the answers to any questions they might have concerning the “heirloom” they had presented.

Throughout the journey, the dagger had remained blessedly silent, without pelting Magnus with any further images, whether they were shreds of memory or something else.

Finally at their destination, they wondered if they should have called ahead. The workshop was small, but exquisitely set up. It didn’t seem quite like the kind of place you just walked into and demanded to talk to the owner of because you had some questions.

It was too late for second thoughts now, however, and a quick round of introductions later, they were sitting across from a short man in leather work clothes and an apron, his greying hair quickly receding.

“My family is from Indonesia,” Magnus was just saying, skirting along the edges of the truth. It felt odd to use his mother tongue like this after so many centuries. “I have a keris blade that was passed down to me by my mother.” Again, not exactly a lie. “I’m hoping to find out more about it.”

With every passing moment, he was feeling more confident using a language that he hadn’t practiced much since he’d been a child. At the same time, he was finding it harder to keep shreds of memory at bay, stored away in recesses of his brain, where he had shoved them while he had tried to embrace his identity as a warlock, unfit to live with humans, the cause of his parents’ deaths…

He wasn’t going to go there. He forced his mind back into the present, this small room, furnished simply but speaking of a wealthy owner who knew precisely how to present his prosperity only to those with the eye to see. A masterfully made keris blade was still sought-after and fetched prime prices, and the trade was growing exceedingly rare.

“If you’re looking to sell,” the old man began.

Magnus shook his head. “I’m looking to understand what I have.”

The man favored him with a long look, then reached for something under his table. “What do you know?”

“Assume I know nothing,” Magnus suggested. “I left the country when I was nine. What memory I have is… not reliable. The Internet isn’t either, in my experience.”

There was a small smile of satisfaction. Even if his words hadn’t been true, even if he hadn’t spent centuries specifically trying to forget what he knew about his home place, all the way until his body swap with Valentine and the subsequent torture had broken open the locks in his mind, he knew how to get an expert to open up about their trade.

The master – the proper term for the blacksmiths who forced the keris blades was _empu_ – pulled out a sample blade from the recesses of the drawers and compartments under the desk. It was far more richly adorned than the dagger Magnus had, but it had the same slightly wavy blade, a similar angled handle.

“The basics,” the man said, and Magnus employed every trick he knew to improve his recall, since he was going to have to repeat all of what he was about to hear back to Alec in English later.

“The keris is made up of three major parts. This first part is the _wilah_ , the blade. The curvature is called _luk._ Most blades have somewhere from three to nineteen waves, but more than twice that can be found. The number is always odd. Very old blades are straight”

“Why the wave?” Magnus inquired.

“It’s aggravating the wounds the blade makes in battle,” the master informed him. “They were used in war, as well as for executions.”

“Would it change the way blood flows?” The question was out before he could stop himself. “Would it be less effective in plugging a wound when stuck in it?”

There was a minute change in the other man’s expression as he processed the question. “My specialty is the weapon, not the body, he said carefully. “I expect it would depend on the precise shape of the blade and the depth of penetration. You’d have to ask someone else about the specifics, though. Even if I knew, I couldn’t tell you without seeing your keris. There are too many variants to its _dhapur_ – the shape of the blade. That’d also be relevant if you were to have your blade appraised for value.” He gestured at the one on the table between them. “This black and silver pattern on the blade is nickel on iron. The patterning is called _pamor_ , and again, it comes in many different patterns and details, all of which have names of their own. That’s the second component that would determine your heirloom’s value.”

He paused a moment, either letting Magnus process what he had just heard, or waiting to see if there was another disclaimer that he was not looking to sell his object. When Magnus gestured for the man to continue, he framed the short handle with his hands.

“The hilt is properly called _hulu_. There are different designs again, but they are all typically carved in some shape. Deities; demons; animals. Our keris makers preferred a human shape. The hilt is often gilded, or carved of ivory, set with precious stones… it’s a work of art and an art in and of itself to make.”

There was a note of price in the man’s voice that told Magnus that he probably produced magnificent hilts.

“The shape,” he continued, “is also optimized for battle, for quick stabbing and retracting. This shape offers little protection to the hand, but it’s maximizing the pressure your palm can apply when stabbing at something.” He mimicked the movement, then pushed the blade at Magnus to try out.

He picked up the weapon gingerly. It felt strange in his hand, like, and yet entirely unlike the dagger he had once pulled from his mother’s dead body. It rested in his hand almost a little too comfortably.

Trying a stab at the air, he could see the man’s point. The curve of the hilt fit precisely into his palm, allowing for maximum pressure in the direction of the movement.

He frowned, flipping the weapon over to point it at his chest. “Stabbing yourself with that would be … awkward.”

If the smith found the comment strange, he didn’t betray it. he merely inclined his head. When Magnus returned the dagger to the table, he continued: “The sheath is—”

A raised hand stopped him. “The sheath isn’t preserved,” Magnus said. “Can we focus on the weapon itself? I don’t want to take up more of your time than necessary.”

“Certainly.” The old man picked up the keris and turned it in his hands. “Making these is a matter of craftsmanship, art, and … spiritual work.” There was a hesitation before the last.

“Magic,” Magnus supplied.

“Magic,” the man confirmed. “The keris is made up of all five elements. Earth is the metal used in the forging, wind is the air pumped into the fire, water tempers the metal. Fire is self-explanatory. The maker performs certain steps to give the blade its soul.”

That made Magnus sit up with a jerk that surely didn’t go unnoticed. “A soul?”

“A well-made keris was considered alive,” the old master said. “It supposedly had a presence. It was thought it could influence its user. A good blade would make its wearer and user more confident, stronger, and might even avert death.”

The switch from fact to supposition was thorough. Then fact was back in the next statement.

“Few people still make living keris blades today.”

“Do you?” Magnus asked.

A vague gesture. Maybe. He wasn’t going to disclose details to a stranger. Magnus understood. He closed his eyes for a moment, wondering if he was about to make a mistake. “Is it conceivable that a soul might get trapped in a keris subsequently… maybe by accident?”

The pause that followed seemed sincere. The master was contemplating the possibility.

“Can’t rule it out,” he determined eventually. “If the blade wasn’t finished right, and no spirit bound to it, it might entrap one. Maybe a soul determined enough to not leave this world could displace the one bound. I haven’t _heard_ of that, but I can’t say it couldn’t happen.”

Magnus glanced at Alec, who was watching their exchange, patient and attentive even though he couldn’t understand a word that was spoken. As if aware that Magnus needed just a little more bolstering, he gave him an encouraging smile, barely going beyond his eyes.

It was enough to bring him to a decision.

“If I was to show you my keris, would you be able to tell me if it has something … anything… in it?”

There was the smallest nod, barely an acknowledgement of what he had asked, but it was there. Magnus extracted the blade he had brought, wrapped in spelled cloth for concealment and safe-keeping, and placed it on the table. He folded back the covering, allowing the smith to study it.

“May I?” the man asked, reaching out without touching.

It was Magnus’ turn to nod.

“This is old,” was the first thing he said as he lifted the piece. There was a hardening in his face, as if he was focusing on something, or making some mental effort.

Another nod.

“In the last two hundred years or so, a specific kind of iron has been preferred for this work. This predates that. The etching here on the blade used to be a naga. A sort of serpent.”

“I know what a naga is,” Magnus said, his voice carefully neutral.

“This is a valuable piece,” the master said. “It looks simple, but it’s well-worked, and a keris this old and still living brings handsome prices.”

“Not selling,” Magnus said. “It was my mother’s.”

“I doubt that,” came the response. “This isn’t a woman’s blade. Might be she was keeping it for someone. You?”

Magnus’ face froze for a moment. “You say it’s still living,” he tried to steer the conversation back on track. “There’s a soul trapped in it?”

“Bound to it,” the other man corrected.

“Can you tell whose?”

“Not unless you left the blade with me for a while.” There was a hint of regret in his voice. Magnus thought he would have liked to work with the old dagger. “I don’t think you want that. It doesn’t want it either. It’s quite angry.”

“Not at me,” Magnus hurried to say. “Not at us.” He remembered what Izzy had said when she had picked it up.

The old man carefully returned the dagger to its cloth and folded the corners over it. “Who did this blade kill?” he asked, his tone conversational.

Magnus swallowed. “My mother.” He figured he owed the man that much.

“I hope you find the answers to your questions,” the man told him, rising as Magnus properly rewrapped his keris and put it away. It appeared that their audience was over. Whatever had gone on between him and the dagger, he didn’t seem inclined to discuss it any further. Magnus had a feeling that prying wouldn’t get him anywhere. It was frustrating, but he probably owed the man the courtesy of not demanding more than he had already received.

They were walking to the door in silence, Alec close enough at Magnus’ shoulder for a surreptitious touch.

They stepped outside, and Magnus turned to thank the man again and bid him farewell. The old master stopped him with a small gesture. “Put the keris under your pillow when you sleep,” he suggested. “You may get your answer then.”

With that, he closed the door between them.

*

Alec had listened carefully to Magnus’ summary of the conversation, nodding here and there but never interruption.

“What comes next?” he had asked eventually. “Do you want to go home and try the pillow thing?”

“Not just yet,” Magnus had determined. “The more I think about it, the less I can shake the feeling that my mother’s change and the appearance of that Anabella woman were just too well matched to be coincidence. I’d like to hear someone else’s take on her.”

“What do you propose?” Alec had asked. You’re probably the only person still alive who met her…”

“Not necessarily.” Magnus’ lips twitched into a slightly lopsided smile. “I realize it’s a long shot, warlocks move, and it’s been hundreds of years… But then again, at least as many of us have stayed in place forever than have spent their lives roving the world. I would like to see if my old teacher is still around.”

Alec hadn’t disagreed. If anything, he’d seemed eager to go. And that was how Magnus had ended up in his home village, or where his home village had been, just for the first time in centuries.

Back then, it had been a little way from the harbor town, on which the East India Company had left its deep impression. At some point in the last few hundred years, the city had grown to touch it, merge with it, and eventually swallow it up. The only thing Magnus could still recognize was the river, its course not precisely the same as it had been thinks to human intervention, but close enough for orientation.

Noon had come and gone, and they were both glad enough to find a place to sit down and eat.

As their meals arrived, Magnus sent off a spell.

It was a sort of unspecific fire message, off to find the closest warlock. With a lot of luck, whoever that was would be able to tell him if his old teacher was still in the vicinity.

They ate at a table outside, talking quietly about what they were going to do and say, both checking their phones now and then for updates. Catarina texted eventually, confirming that her friend’s daughter agreed that her mother had seemed unusually tired recently.

“She thought it had something to do with a secret boyfriend.” She elaborated when Magnus called her. Seems she was seeing someone and trying to keep it to herself.” She gave a chuckle. “Never try to hide anything from your kid. They always figure it out.”

“Could it have been a woman?” Magnus asked. “We’re thinking—” he broke off, distracted by a glowing white sphere zipping into view around a corner. “I need to go. I’ll send you a picture.”

A memory photograph of Anabella went into Catarina’s What’s App. He waited just long enough to confirm that the second checkmark appeared before putting his phone away.

“Guide,” he told Alec, indicating the sphere hovering back and forth about half the way between the corner and their table. “We should follow.”

Alec rose, carefully adjusting his glamored bow. “We’re following that to an unknown warlock? Is this safe?”

“We’re Inquisitor Lightwood-Bane and the Magnus Lightwood-Bane, High Warlock of Alicante. What can go wrong?” Magnus asked, his cheerful tone a little forced. He could think of a few things, but he had reached the point where he wanted to get to the bottom of things.

He had to grin in spite of himself when he spotted Alec’s expression just a second before he schooled his features into something more neutral.

They had activated glamors, using the mundanes’ instinct to move out of the way and let them through to navigate the streets speedily as they followed their glowing guide. Although ahead of them, it adjusted its speed to theirs, keeping the distance roughly consistent as long as they were moving.

A brisk walk brought them into a quarter situated where Magnus could only remember forest. Try as he might, he could not match anything in his memory to the buildings they passed, or the one they ended up at.

The glowing sphere vanished through the closed door.

“Well,” Magnus said, ready to check ring or knock, hoping that there would be any indication of something reminiscent of a warlock name, or some sort of sign telling them where to go.

He needn’t have worried. The door sprang open as he stepped in front of it.

Aware that a bow was only of limited use inside a building, Alec placed a hand on his sword, ready to draw at need. He toed the door open wider, checking inside.

It was a staircase, plain and clean, the only thing unusual about it a flash of light from above as the guide sphere moved up and down the same three steps again and again, waiting for them to catch up.

They climbed, silently, all senses alert and each as aware of the other’s movements as if they were trained to go into battle together.

Up they went, floor by floor, and while he was wondering whether someone was trying to tire them out, Magnus had to admit to himself that the sphere probably wasn’t able to operate an elevator.

On the seventh floor, the ball of light passed through another door. This one remained closed to them.

Magnus raised his hand to knock, politely adjusting both the force and the frequency of the taps, then steeled himself for whatever might wait for them.

He was reasonably sure no one here had reason to wish either of them ill, but he was equally aware that not every warlock reacted entirely positively to a sudden request for help from a stranger, and one known to associate closely with Shadowhunters to boot. Relations had improved, but they were far from perfect.

The door opened, and Magnus barely managed to bite back a sigh of relief. The landscape and village had changed beyond recognition, but the face before him, albeit topping a body clad in modern dress, had not.

Magnus bowed politely, suddenly feeling nine years old again, and ridiculously guilty for not having said farewell before running at the same time.

“Magnus Lightwood-Bane,” the older warlock said, stepping aside to clear the door and beckon them in. The words sounded strange from his lips, more amused than Magnus typically expected people to be when they greeted him. “Might it be that we know each other?”

“We do,” Magnus admitted, following him, and letting Alec bring up the rear. “It was a long time ago.”

“I thought you had Siti’s looks,” the other man said bluntly. “Don’t look so surprised, High Warlock of Alicante. Your likeness is everywhere in the shadow world. I was wondering if it was you.”

“It is,” Magnus admitted. I… we need your help, _Pak_.” He used the formal address, just as he had when he had been a child and the man his teacher.

“What could I help a great warlock like you with?” came a return question. “What about your friend? Does he not speak?”

“Husband,” Magnus corrected. “He speaks, but not this language.”

His old teacher studied Alec. “Nederlands?” he asked.

Alec made a face and shook his head apologetically. “I’m sorry.”

The warlock sighed. “English then.”

“Thank you,” Alec said with relief. “And thank you for your willingness to help us, Mr.—”

Magnus realized he hadn’t ever mentioned his teacher’s name. He had never _called_ him by his name, which would have been against their customs, and he’d not even really thought of him by name while he’d been living there. He’d barely ever allowed himself to think of him at all after he had run, just like everything else connected to the earliest part of his life.

“Guntur,” the warlock supplied. He gestured at a table, strewn with documents, books and teamaking paraphernalia. “I didn’t expect visitors, so you’ll have to excuse the state of this place. Please, sit. We’ll talk better over a drink.”

His English was accented, but good. There was no doubt that he had practice in the language. Magnus sat, Alec taking the chair next to him. Cups and saucers came hurtling through the air from an adjacent room, settling neatly in front of them as papers jumped out of the way. Magnus couldn’t help but admire the ease of the spell, confirming that his first teacher was a more than middling magic user.

“So,” the older warlock said once all cups were filled and he had waved his work aside, to stack itself neatly on a sideboard against the wall. “What brings Asmara back to his homeland after so many years.”

“My mother,” Magnus said honestly. “I have questions.”

“Don’t we all?” Again, more amusement than was warranted. He looked at Alec. “One day, a woman from the village showed up on my doorstep. Her son, she said, was not entirely of this world. He could do things that were not natural. For a moment, I thought she wanted me to help her destroy him. It would have been her death, had she asked. Instead, what she asked for were lessons. She was willing to pay for them, one way or another, as long as her husband wouldn’t know… about the payment, or about the lessons. The Dutch didn’t approve of…” he twiddled his fingers, causing sparks of magic to rise.

Alec nodded his understanding. Magnus felt chilled. That was a bit more information than the dagger had given him.

“Believe me or not, I took no payment. Either way. I hadn’t expected to find another apprentice with the Dutch around. It’s the closest we ever get to having a son, so I wasn’t going to complain.”

He gave Magnus a look and allowed himself a small grin. “Then it turned out the boy was quite talented, and a pleasure to teach. Bit cheeky at times.”

Magnus knew he looked just a little smug.

“So,” Guntur said. “What did you need me for?”

“That last day,” Magnus said, feeling the weight of the memory again. He had gone through that memory more often in the last two days than in the last two hundred years, and it wasn’t promising to get any easier anytime soon. “I came home to find my mother dead. Stabbed with a keris to her heart. I was still processing when my father came in. He started yelling at me, calling me devil’s spawn, claiming she’d killed herself because she couldn’t bear giving birth to a monster.” He swallowed. “I incinerated him with a fireball. I only started wondering if he was mistaken.”

The other warlock gave a low growl. “In three years, she never implied in any manner that she was anything but happy to have you,” he ground out after a moment. “Claas that …” the words that followed were both Indonesian and a curse so crude Magnus hoped Alec wasn’t going to request a translation because he would have been hard pressed to find an appropriate term in English. Going by the expression on his husband’s face, however, he had understood the intent behind them well enough. “…didn’t deserve a quick death like that. I was hoping it was you, though, rather than some rogue passing through. I would have begrudged anyone else the honor.”

Magnus stared at him for a moment before remembering his manners. “I’m not sure I get your meaning.”

“You’re getting my meaning alright,” came the response. “Had Siti ever even hinted at wanting him out of the way, I would have been too happy to arrange for something to happen. I’m not even sure why she didn’t.” He sighed. “No, I do know. As long as he was there, she was reasonably safe, and so were you. Few people would have touched either of you while you were associated with them.”

He turned his head, looking somewhere in the distance for a moment, and making Magnus wonder if there had been more to his refusal to take payment than the joy of having an apprentice.

“I’ve been thinking about that time,” he said instead of asking. That would have required an entirely different level of rudeness. “I have an idea of who was responsible for her death.”

The other warlord perked up. “Is it too much to hope he’s still alive?”

“I don’t know,” Magnus admitted. “All of this started because we came across a death that mirrored my mother’s, so maybe. Not a ‘he’, though. There was a woman living among the Dutch at the time. Her name was Anabella. The first time I saw her was… maybe two, three weeks before that day?”

Guntur thought, focusing hard inwards. He shook his head. “I kept away from the Dutch where I could. The name means nothing to me.”

Magnus showed him the same memory photograph he had previously sent to Catarina.

His former teacher made a disgusted sound. “Oh aye. That I do remember.” His face had darkened, and the entire atmosphere in the room seemed to adjust to it. “That isn’t a woman. Are you saying it was hunting outside of the city?”

“She came to our house a few times to have tea,” Magnus said. “It? What – what is that, if not a woman?” He tried to remember more. Was there anything he could use to place her?

He didn’t have to. Guntur wasn’t shy about sharing what information he had. “I’m not entirely sure myself,” he admitted. “A corrupted warlock? Some minor demon maybe. Not fully human in any case. Fueled up on life force. I stayed out of its way. It stayed inside the city walls. _Or so I thought._ ” The last came with a menacing tone.

“My mother seemed… we’d call it depressed today… the weeks before her death,” Magnus said. “Having your life force leeched from you would do that. Why kill her though?”

“It may have needed a boost,” his old master suggested. “The slow leeching would be keeping it alive and strong, but if it had to do anything more spectacular – or maybe if it was preparing to leave and didn’t know when it could find new prey. You can’t exactly eat the crew on your ship.”

Magnus nodded thoughtfully.

“We have someone checking records for similar cases,” Alec pointed out. “The woman killed this week was also a warlock child’s mother. There may be more to the pattern.”

“We’re going to—” Magnus went on, only to be interrupted by the chiming of his phone.

He picked it up, studying the message he had received.

“Jace has news,” he announced flatly. “He’s asking that we come back for a meeting. Seems he’s found more cases.

“If you can find it,” Guntur said. “Are you going to hunt it down?”

“We will.” Two words, spoken in two voices in perfect unison.

“Give me fifteen minutes to wrap up here,” the other warlock said. “I’ll come with you. I want in on the hunt.”


	7. Chapter 7

An hour later, they had relocated to the house in Alicante, completed their introductions, and assembled at the larger table again.

Catarina summarized again what she had sent to Magnus already; Magnus and Alec took a little more time to explain what they had learned, and let their guest share the information he had just imparted on them concerning Anabella.

Jace listened in silence. He had a folder in front of him, neatly stacked paper inside it.

Eventually, all eyes turned to him.

His lips tightened briefly as if he was about to say something particularly unpleasant.

“I’ve found a pattern,” he announced, placing a copy of a file on the table, the cover sheet showing the picture of a woman and some basic details. “Alana Herring, England, died in 1967. She had a warlock son. Her death was ruled suicide.” Another file, older, the picture black and white. “Francoise Lacroix, France. Dead in 1917. Warlock child, no further information.” Another, without a picture, the text handwritten. “Sophia Lopez, Mexico. Warlock daughter. Suicide, but the death was ruled suspicious. 1817.”

They passed the files around as Jace continued to lay out more. “Anna Schneider, Germany; 1767. Suicide, warlock daughter. Helena Meyer, Germany again, 1717, it doesn’t say that she was a warlock’s mother, but implied. Her son is called a “young man of questionable origin. Ruled murder disguised as suicide but no one convicted.” He hesitated briefly before pulling out the next folder. “Siti Schouten, Indonesia, 1617.” He didn’t say anything else about her.

Magnus felt eyes on him and forced himself to calmly reach for the next file as he explained: “Indonesians didn’t use last names. Dutch did. Her husband was Claas Schouten.”

“Well,” Simon said, “That makes you—”

“Don’t even go there,” Magnus interrupted, but there was a little less tension in his posture as he opened the file on Sophie Lopez, who had died in Mexico.

Jace wasn’t quite done yet. “Clara van Leeuwen, Netherlands. 1567, suicide, warlock son. And this one – Marya Peters, 1317. The area’s Poland today. This is the last one.”

“We’re looking at one death every fifty years,” Izzy noted. “Some are missing, but we can assume that’s because the cases weren’t reported. We’re not sure about the first one, but the year and the details match.”

“Open the Meyer one,” Jace said. “Sorry, Magnus.”

He watched with some apprehension as Alec did what he was told, leaving through the file. Most of it was inconspicuous. The woman had been living with her husband. Their son had grown up relatively normal, his warlock mark a tail easily concealed under clothing. Both her husband and her son had refused to accept the ruling of suicide, and their resistance went beyond the expected since suicides could not be buried in sacred ground and were considered eternally damned. It appeared that the woman had made a friend in the weeks before her death. A foreign woman, wealthy and respected, as the report said. A drawing was included. Magnus inhaled sharply as he laid eyes on it. The copy wasn’t great, the drawing hadn’t been superb either, but he knew that face. It was firmly stored in his memory, and he had cast it onto a memory photograph just recently.

“A shapeshifter,” he noted. “She takes on her victims’ form then?”

“Possibly,” Izzy agreed. “But there’s a 100-year gap between your mother’s death and Helena’s. I don’t think she needs to take on her most recent victim’s shape – there’d have been one in between.”

“Unless she only kills _when_ she needs a new identity,” Jace added. “But then the 50-year-interval makes no sense.”

Magnus’ face was hard as he looked at his friends. “Whoever – whatever this is: I want her found.”

“And find her we will,” Alec promised.

“We have people out questioning her surroundings about someone she may have recently met,” Izzy explained. “The secret companion her daughter mentioned… we know there was _someone_. We’re trying to get at the knife that was used to kill her. We don’t have anyone associated with the mundane police in Philadelphia, I’m afraid, so this is a bit tricky. We can’t just walk in and retrieve it … but it’s our best chance for tracking. I’m not even sure the _keris_ would track to Magnus, never mind its owner from back then.”

Magnus couldn’t argue with that. He bit back the urge to tell her to hurry. They were processing things as quickly as they could. With that in mind and knowing that there was nothing he could do but wait, he suddenly felt deeply exhausted, fighting hard to stifle a yawn.

He hadn’t slept the last night, he remembered, and barely the night before. He’d made several long-distance portal trips, each time leading one other person through with him. The sun was setting again. It would have been more surprising if he hadn’t been tired.

“I’ll try to sleep,” he announced, getting sympathetic nods from all around. “Wake me up if anything happens?”

*

Magnus stood in a plane of white mist, shapeless light billowing in all directions.

Looking around, uncertain of where he had ended or, or why, he stiffened as he spotted a swirling pattern in the clouds, an eddy appearing, spinning, not unlike a cyclone, then coalescing, darkening…

He couldn’t quite tell the moment when it went from mist to shape. One moment, he was staring at a spectacle that shouldn’t have been possible. The next, he was standing face to face with a woman he had never expected to see again.

His mother looked tired, though not as tired as she had during those last days of her life. She smiled at him, a sparkle in her eyes that he hadn’t seen since that day she had first met the creature that called itself Annabelle.

“Asmara,” she said, using the name she had once given him.

“Mama.” The word felt strange. Even when talking to her in Indonesian, he had addressed her in Dutch. She’d insisted. It was a precaution, one more thing to keep his father from ever finding out by accident that they were conversing in her mother tongue when he wasn’t there. For the first time, he realized just how hard it must have been for her. Indonesian required far greater formality between children and parents than Dutch did.

“Is this really… you?” the last word was barely a whisper.

“As real as I can be,” she told him. “And that is not very real anymore. I’m glad that we get to talk one last time. You weren’t easy to reach.”

“I’m sorry.” He sounded sheepish, felt more than that. “I’m not used to opening my mind to… things I do not quite understand. Do you know what is happening?”

“My son,” she said. “immediately jumping to business.” She reached out to put her hand on his arm, sighing when she passed right through him. “I’ve gleaned some, when you were focused on it while handling the keris, and from your friend who wanted to take it away.”

“Isabelle Lightwood,” Magnus supplied readily. “My sister in law. She would have returned it.”

“But not in time,” his mother said. Before he could ask in time for what, she continued: “How does your father fare?”

“it’s been four hundred years,” Magnus pointed out, unsure of how much you noticed of time passing when you were locked in a dagger. “He would be dead either way by now…” He looked away briefly, then met her eyes. He could see a darkness swirling in them that wasn’t real. Then again, nothing about her right now was real. “I killed him. He walked in, started berating me, threatening… I acted before he could. I burned him on the spot.”

“I didn’t mean Claas,” she corrected, her tone suggesting that she didn’t think her husband’s untimely death too great a loss for the world. “I don’t assume anyone mourned him too greatly. Some women and girls in the city may have been relieved.”

And that probably answered the question of whether she’d been aware of the things he had spied on that one night. He said nothing.

“Have you met him?”

 _Him_. His father. Not the merchant Claas Schouten. He nodded.

“Who is he?”

“His name’s Asmodeus,” Magnus informed her. “He was… more of a father to me than Claas, but he’s also a demon. I banished him, first back to his own realm and then into the void, where he can do no more evil. “

She raised her eyebrows at him but didn’t comment.

“Tell me what happened that day,” he asked her before she could demand any further information.

“Impatient,” she noted.

“I’m asleep,” he reminded her. “If anyone wakes me up, our chance to talk will be over.”

That brought him a nod. “Alright then. I met Annabelle on the market. She went out of her way to make friends. I let her. Maybe I was even a bit flattered that one of them had chosen me as her special local friend. I don’t even know anymore. After the first time she visited our place, I was starting to feel so… tired, all the time. For a few days, I worried that Guntur may have been mistaken and that he—” she broke off.

Was that a blush in her pale cheeks, as she realized that she had almost shared something she thought was none of his business?

Had she just almost implied exactly what he thought she had, or was that his imagination speaking because of his old teacher’s quick desire to join their team?

It didn’t matter. What she did in her husband’s absence was no one’s business but her own. He had had two wives, or more than that, and they had been very much aware of that. Why, then, should she not have had someone in his absence?

It wouldn’t have been proper, of course. Men and women were held to different standards then.

He didn’t care.

She had continued in the meantime, and he scrambled to follow her word, half-lost under his own thoughts. “You’d snuck off. I was pretty sure I knew where you’d gone. Claas was due at some point that night. I was ready, waiting for him the way he liked it. If he came in hungry for his wife, and got exactly what he sought, then there was a good chance he would never notice his son was missing. He was never quite happy that you were around in the first place. It was a complication, legally, economically, and because he couldn’t be quite as free with me anymore as he used to.”

He nodded, careful not to show much of a reaction. No matter how much he hated his stepfather at the thought, there was some information he needed, and it had nothing to do with Claas.

“When someone came in, I thought for sure it was him. Imagine my surprise when it was Annabelle standing in the door frame instead. But she wasn’t the Annabelle I’d come to know. She looked different. Dangerous. Hungry, in a bad way. Not quite different from the way men look before they take what they think is their due. She didn’t do that, of course. She was wearing a necklace, always. She’d been careful to conceal it under her dress before. This was the first time I saw it out. It had a stone pendant. Ruby, maybe. Red, in any case. It was blazing. When the light hit me, I just felt so… tired. Worse than before. Heavy… I couldn’t move. She had a keris in her hand, and she was chanting as she approached. From the moment I realized what was going to happen, I focused all I had on that blade. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t do anything to save myself. The only thing I could hope for was to somehow linger long enough to say farewell to you – and there was only one thing in that room that could hold a soul outside its body.”

Magnus didn’t assume she’d been quite as calm and clinical about it then, but he was grateful that that was how she was telling it. it made it a little easier not to imagine her terror undiluted. He shuddered at the thought that she could have chosen to share _that_ memory with him directly.

“The keris wasn’t inhabited then?” He asked, remembering what the smith had said.

“Oh, it was,” she told him. “There was some resistance. I was determined, and desperate. The spirit in the blade wouldn’t share, so I shoved… and pushed and squeezed, and then I snapped into place where I didn’t belong. Everything after that is a blur. I think it took me decades to get my mind together enough again to process anything around me. Longer before I remembered what had happened, and who I was. And now…” She looked at him with sad eyes. “I’m not meant to be here. The bindings are aging, and they’re not matched to me either way. I’m losing hold. Some day, not far from now, I’ll be gone.”

He nodded, understanding. “What do you want? What should I do?”

She met his eyes, her gaze hard and relentless, and he understood that he was looking at the woman who had spent her life doing what she had to survive as well as she could. She’d married a foreigner, conceived a child that wasn’t his, hidden the fact from him with success, and managed to give the child as much as she possibly could of his heritage.

“Revenge,” she said. “I want that thing tracked down and killed, once and for all. Can you do that?”

*

“Get me that dagger,” he’d told Izzy after he had rolled out of bed and thrown on the bare minimum of clothes that you needed to wear to talk to your sister in law. “I don’t care how, but we need it, and fast. Before any trace on it has gone cold.”

He’d offered to fetch it himself, if she got him close enough to it that he could summon it to him. That hadn’t been necessary. He didn’t know how exactly she had done it. He’d ask her about it later.

Warlock tracking was stronger than Shadowhunter tracking, and he’d worked with a map, making the section where the blade’s owner was hiding light up brightly, finding a new map of that area and repeating the process, until he had narrowed down their target’s whereabouts to a country estate outside of Bordeaux. She’d travelled after her last kill, it appeared.

They had surrounded the place, Shadowhunters and warlocks, working together to seal the creature in, to prevent an escape by portaling, should she have mastered that skill. Then they went in – he and Alec, Izzy, Jace, Simon and Guntur. Catarina remained with the warlocks outside the perimeter Whatever was going to happen had the potential of being dangerous, and she had two girls to take care of.

They narrowed their ring, as if tightening a net bit by bit, magic shooting back and forth between the warlocks. They still didn’t know exactly what they were up against, but they were hoping that they’d caught it by surprise.

She met them outside the manor hose, looking nothing like Magnus remembered, yet radiating a feel he recognized immediately. It was that sense of wrongness he had perceived as a child, much easier to place now that he was older and more experienced. In her current appearance, she was tall, slender, with short blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. And she was angry. Angry at the intruders, angry at being caught… he didn’t know. What he did know, beyond a doubt, was that she would have killed them on the spot, had she been able to. Even as she was, brimming with power, she must have realized that if she killed one of them, the others would be on her before she had gathered herself for a second spell, or whatever sort of attack she had in mind.

“That’s her!” he heard himself call out before he realized he was going to say anything. Guntur already had a spell flashing from his hands. Alec has his bow at the ready.

Choosing the opposite direction, she threw up her hands, dark smoke rising. Spell and arrow went wide, deflected as the space around her distorted, shifted and warped. She couldn’t portal away, but nothing prevented her from changing the very ground she stood on.

When the wind blew away the billows, they stood facing a labyrinth, built not of hedges, but of walls of magic. He’d seen the like before, on magical fairs and shadow markets. Faces set grimly, they walked forward, entering after her.

The maze shifted, any wall they didn’t watch prone to disappearing and reappearing elsewhere. It wasn’t long before they’d been separated. “Keep going!” Alec called out. He sent his other command to their phones. _When you see her, shoot to kill._

No matter what she did, she couldn’t leave the maze through the entrance. She’d walk right into their backup’s hands that way. Still, they couldn’t just leave her alone in there and wait her out. No one could tell what she’d be able to cook up with in the meantime.

Magnus moved forward, magic held ready in his hands, the keris in his belt virtually trembling with anticipation. As he reached a branch, he was about to continue to the left when he felt the tug on his mind, the touch now familiar enough.

“Left you say?” he muttered. He turned, forcing himself not to think that he was now moving based on the instructions of a centuries-old weapon that had at least part of his mother’s soul, if not all of it, bound to it.

It seemed that the keris knew what it was doing. He reached the center of the maze faster than he had expected. A text to Alec went off before he stepped out of the cover of the walls, exposing himself to her view, his magic flying to interrupt whatever spell she was preparing.

She turned, snarling at him, her face more demonic than human.

“Give yourself up!” he advised. “You’re surrounded. You cannot win this. It ends now, one way or the other.”

He didn’t much care which way it ended right then. The dagger by his side certainly did, and he suspected that so did at least one other from their party.

“Annabelle,” Magnus said, using the only name he had for her. He cast a binding spell her way, only to have it deflected uselessly. “It’s over. Surrender!”

“Never!”

The softness of the voice didn’t match the feral snarl on her face. Then that face melted, her entire body seemingly dissolving, then congealing, its every shape and feature now quite different, and horribly, terribly familiar. He didn’t know if it was the name he’d used that had tipped her off, or the keris at his belt, or something entirely different, but at that moment, she’d chosen the likeness he had only remembered in death for so long. The face he had talked to last night, her body looking utterly wrong in clothes made for someone at least a head taller than her.

“You wouldn’t harm me, would you?” she asked, her voice sending a cold shudder down his spine. If anything, it felt even more real than the mother in his dream had. For a fraction of a second, he hesitated, uncertain if he could do what he had to.

She chose that moment to attack.

Reflex saved him as he dove, rolled, and avoided the spell that had come hurtling at him too fast to shape a counter. When he surged back to his feet, the dagger was no longer at his belt.

In battle, he had read, the keris could guide the hand that wielded it. He would wonder, later, how it had felt to those warriors of old. Did they welcome it? Did they begrudge the loss of agency?

In his case, it didn’t matter, as things happened at a speed that didn’t even allow him to realize what was going on before he found himself face to face with the creature, a hand he wasn’t entirely in control of driving the tip of the blade into his opponent’s chest.

As the steel pierced his mother’s heart a second time, he could sense a build-up of power, a surge growing so suddenly that his shields were only half-formed as it erupted, throwing him into the closest wall.


	8. Chapter 8

He must have been dazed for a few moments.

As his mind cleared, he found himself looking into Alec’s worried face.

“Magnus!” the word reached his brain a moment later, and he shook himself, raising his hand to put it on his husband’s in a reassuring gesture.

“I’m alright,” he claimed, though he hadn’t taken inventory yet. Bruises, surely, he thought. His right hand was tingling, feeling numb from the impact and the discharge. That would pass. He could feel it subsiding already. He pushed up, grateful that Alec didn’t object, but instead offered him a hand to lever himself to his feet. “Is she—”

It wasn’t the smartest question, and he stopped before he had finished it. Maybe it had been more than a few moments. The maze was gone. They were standing in the greenery outside of the manor house. The other Shadowhunters had gathered round, still guarding against unpleasant surprises. Catarina and Guntur were crouched over something on the ground. The keris lay abandoned in the grass a little distance away.

He went to snatch it up, realizing as he did so that the blade was dead, its soul gone.

“Let me see,” he said, addressing the other two warlocks. He needed to know what Anabella had turned into as she died.

“Just a second,” Catarina returned. As she shifted, he could see magic playing around her hands, sealing torn skin exposed through a cut shirt. His mind refused to process what his eyes told him. Was she _healing_ the very creature they had just hunted down?

Maybe he had hit his head harder than he’d wanted to admit to himself, he thought as he realized two things at once.

The first was that Anabella hadn’t changed at all from the last shape she’d held when he had stabbed her.

The second that the eyes looking up at him from her face were not the same that had stared at him earlier.

Catarina moved back, allowing Guntur to help the woman to her feet. She moved slowly, awkwardly, as if she’d forgotten to how coordinate a body at some point of the last four hundred years.

“What happens now?” she asked, the words in Indonesian and only comprehensible to him and his teacher.

Their eyes met, and Magnus felt his breath catch in his throat, glad for Alec’s arm that had snaked around his shoulders in silent support.

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “But we’ll figure it out.”

THE END


End file.
